The De Soto School District has been awarded a Missouri Purple Star designation from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
The designation is awarded to schools that have shown a commitment to students and families connected to service members.
Agencies that earn the designation display a Purple Star onsite and on their websites.
Assistant Superintendent Ron Farrow said the designation reflects the district’s work to integrate families of service members into the community.
“There are different challenges when you’re in an active military family,” Farrow said. “You’re transient. You’re probably not going to graduate from the same school district you entered in kindergarten, or maybe even freshman year. You may be in one school district to start the school year, another to end it and a third one in between.”
Farrow said he didn’t know how many district students are children of active service members, but added that “it’s higher than you might think.
“When I was (principal at) Athena, we had more than five such families. All of them stayed at the school for a while, but that’s not always the case,” he said.
Farrow said the district has a section on its website devoted to military families.
“It has information about enrolling in our district and includes links to special resources for those families,” he said.
Farrow said district administrators meet with parents and students at both ends of their stay in De Soto – both incoming and outgoing.
“We want to do what we can to ease that transition and try to ease the stress involved in that process,” he said.
Farrow said he hadn’t given a lot of thought to the challenges students from military families face until he attended the Purple Star recognition ceremony.
“One of the dads (from another school in the state that earned the recognition) got up and spoke, and he said it best. ‘None of these kids volunteer for this. They have to go through with this, changing schools, making new friends.’
“Listening to some of the parents and the students at the program, I learned they really go through a lot. What we want to do is to try to make it as easy for them as we can.”
